Bacon No. 1 is here. What now?

As promised, UPS delivered the initial package of bacon on March 14th, two days ago. I'm nervous. Some suffer from completion anxiety; I suffer from outset anxiety. Earlier today, the warehouse guy chided me for not even cooking one piece of it yet. He may be right, I may be more hesitant than is warranted. Or, he may just have been angling for some. He didn't get any, but we did go to a hofbrau later, one which features a slowly rotating, slowly roasting turkey in a little peepshow-like booth on either side of the front door (no picture). He made a big show out of eating a lot, and I can't help but feel like some of the eating was directed at me.

This particular bacon comes to us from Kentucky, and is a dry-cured cinnamon-spiced gentleman of hickory extraction. Dry-curing apparently means it won't shrink during cooking (since no water is absorbed in the curing process, none has to be handed its hat on the green mile), so unlike most bacon, you (I) won't wind up with a linguini-size string of meat in the middle of two deeply scalloped and ballooning fat-edges. But that's just structural. The real thing to consider here is the cinnamon.

My copy of Culinary Artistry suggests the following flavor pairings with cinnamon: apples, berries, chicken, chocolate, coffee, lamb, oranges, pears, rice, tea, and zucchini, (to name a few). So...coq au vin, sausages with an apple-bacon sauerkraut...wait. One thing I despise in food writing is watching amateurs make up fanciful dishes the way eighth-grade girls write elaborate descriptions of makeout scenes with Cary Elwes. Fuckin' A, food writing. Do not be a girl on my bus when I was thirteen.

It is time for me to withdraw into the Fortress of Weeping Pipes (a corroded pipe under the kitchen sink recently resulted in me making a lousy repair) and consider my options. I bid you cinnamon dreams and carabiner kisses, whatever that might mean. (What did you picture in your head?)